Team:Calgary/Project/Synergy

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Synergy: Putting it all Together

Incorporating human practices in the design of our system

In the earlier stages of our project, we realized that in order to give our project the best chance of being implemented, we needed to do it in a way that was in line with both industry’s wants and needs. In order to ensure we did this, we established a dialogue with several experts in order to get their opinions on how we should approach our project. This led to an informed design of our system, in which we emphasized the need for both physical and genetic containment devices.

Have we accomplished our goal?

Nearing the end of our project however, we wanted to see if we had accomplished what we set out to do. So we decided to go back to the experts, this time taking the progress we’ve made on our project with us. We got a variety of different perspectives from suggestions on the...... The results of all of these can be found on our Interviews page. One major concern was scale-up. One expert wanted to know how feasible this system would actually be. We have some FRED components, we have OSCAR components, and we have some killswitch components, but how functional are some of these parts, and how do they wok together. So our next major goal was to establish synergy: try to put some of these pieces together in order to assess how far we’d actually gotten.

Putting FRED together

Can we sense toxins in tailings ponds?

Putting together our killswitches

Our flux-based analysis allowed us to realize the potential for glycine to be used not only as a way to increase the yield of OSCAR, but also as an auxotrophic killswitch. This allowed our model to be used not only to inform our wetlab, but also our human practices. We wanted to see how this auxotrophic marker system could work with one of our inducible killswitch constructs. So we transformed our rhamnose inducible killswitch construct with S7 (BBa_K902084) into our glycine knockout strain and attempted to characterize cell death over a variety of conditions.

Putting our Killswitch into OSCAR

Taking FRED out to the field!

Bioreactor field test

pics, video, GC-MS data